I took an internal flight from La Paz to the little town of Rurrenabaque on the edge of the jungle. The distance was only actually about 150km yet it takes 24 hours to travel between them by road - you can imagine how bad the roads must be! I therefore decided that flying was definitely the best option. Rurrenabaque is right on the edge of the Madidi national park which is a huge area of rainforest. I had arranged with a local company to do a 3-day trek in the jungle. Unfortunately, there are a lot of rubbish companies who offer treks and boat trips into the jungle who do a lot of damage to the area by feeding the animals etc so I was sure to pick one of the "ecotourism" ones that don't do ... read more

When my month off work finally arrived, I quickly packed my minimal luggage and fled to South America. The journey from Bristol involved 26 hours of travelling including 2 flights and 8 hours sitting around at Paris airport, but eventually I made it to Santiago - the capital of Chile. The best bit about Santiago was probably the flight into the city where the plane had the weave its way between some big Andean mountains. The city itself doesn't have that many sights of interest but the 2 nights I spent there were a nice introduction to South America. I had planned on learning a basic level of Spanish before arriving but I hadn't learnt anywhere near as much as I'd hoped due to being busy with work etc. This made the first few days quite ... read more

I've gone a bit photo-mad on this blog entry and it's also quite a long one. It's been an extremely busy last week and a half with a lot of moving around. After leaving Franz Josef, my next stop was the adrenaline capital of the world - Queenstown. The city and the surrounding area is basically just like a huge playground where you can do pretty much every extreme sport and activity that you can think of. Queenstown has a brilliant setting as it's positioned right next to Lake Wakatipu with snow-capped mountains all around it - it's a great looking place when you see it on a clear day. I definitely couldn't visit Queenstown without doing a bungy jump since the very first commercial bungy was created there. I'd always planned on doing a bungy ... read more

After leaving Rotorua once Christmas was over, my next stop was the little town of Turangi which is situated right on the edge of the Tongariro national park. Now, I'm not really that into hiking but there is a famous 1 day trek which is known as the Tongariro Crossing and it looked pretty cool so I thought I'd give it a try. The trek is about 19.5kms and usually takes most of the day, but there's also the option of going up to the peak of Mount Ngauruhoe which is an active volcano that was used as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings films. I only had time to spend 2 nights in Turangi so this meant that I didn't have any flexibility on which day I could do the crossing on if ... read more

I took a flight from Alice Springs to Cairns on a ridiculously empty plane - it had about 20 people on it. I think there were almost as many staff on the plane as passengers. Also on the same flight was another English guy called Paul who I'd met at the hostel in Alice Springs, so I had a travel buddy for a few days whilst I was in Cairns. For some reason, Cairns seemed to be a bit of a cheaper city to stay in than some of the others I've been to in Australia and this was helped by the fact that every evening one of the bars offered a free evening meal to everyone who stayed at our hostel. Even better than this, on the first night me and Paul did the weekly ... read more